I ditched Windows 8 and went Ubuntu by mistake

This post is coming to you courtesy of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. While I could tell you I thought it would be cool to use Ubuntu Linux as my primary desktop OS for a while, I would be lying. The fact is I don’t have a choice because I messed up the Windows 8 boot partition on my laptop last night while trying to install Ubuntu in a dual-boot situaion. I wasn’t going to keep Ubuntu on for long. I had booted it from a USB stick previously. So why wasn’t booting Ubuntu from a USB stick good enough, and how did I wind up stuck in Linux land? I’m glad you asked; it is a bit of a long story.